Review – Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory

NIS America has brought another of their RPG’s across the ocean from Japan. Did Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory make a successful voyage or should it have never left Japan?

Read our review to find out.

For those new to this series, Hyperdimension Neptunia takes place in Gamindustri, a world with four nations that reference current real world hardware manufacturers. There’s Lowee (Nintendo), Lastation (Sony), Leanbox (Microsoft), and Planeptune (SEGA). In this installment of the game, the series heroine Neptune is sent to an alternate dimension, where the nations are young and just starting out. The storyline covers roughly twenty years worth of the console wars and starts out in the late 80’s. If you know your video gaming history from this era, you’ll be able to pick up on most of the references and be able to figure out who or what each character represents. The game really does a good job of parodying history through 2D cut scenes and story panels.

Gameplay for the title falls into several areas. There’s a series of 2D world maps that you’ll use to navigate from one area to another, a 3D world where you’ll navigate through areas and dungeons, and an extension of that 3D world for actual battles.

Navigation Maps

The 2D maps show you where each world is located and allows you to travel between them. If there are new items or events available in a particular world, that is indicated by an icon by that world’s location on the map. The map makes the game very easy to navigate and also makes it simple to see which area has new content available to you. You can also access the main menu from the overall map and this allows you to save your game anytime you do.

The 3D areas allow you to travel around and meet opponents to initiate battles. Battles are fought in turn based style, but without a grid to limit your movement. How battles are started determines who initially has the upper hand. If you spot one of the bad guys walking around, you can walk up to it and press the action key in order to get the jump on them and then have the first turn in the battle, but if they come up behind you and initiate the attack, they get to go first. Each battle you win can net you some useful items and earns you Experience Points to help to make your characters stronger.

The enemies you battle start out pretty east to defeat, even when there are multiple bad guys facing you. Eventually though you’ll run into bosses that aren’t only extra tough, but have regenerative heath that makes them almost unbeatable.

While roaming around these 3D areas, you’ll be able to jump to reach some higher areas and you’ll have a special search feature that sends out sonar like waves to aid you in finding hidden items that can be very useful. This can come in handy when looking for quest items that might not be easy to find.

The game follows in its predecessor’s foot steps with an anime style of art and design that look good and are easy on the eyes. It’s not a bad looking game by no means, it’s just really more of the same. No real upgrades from either previous version so don’t expect anything new as far as graphics or design. The art work is nicely done, though and that’s not a bad thing. Fans of the series will definitely be happy with that.

The audio for the game has some pretty cool sounding tracks, and we were given the full soundtrack with our review copy. It has twenty four tracks in total and is very similar to the music in past games. The music ranges from dark and gloomy to light and cheery, depending on the situation. The audio sound great and has some originality to it, but for the most part it’s very similar to the past two titles.

Fans of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series will find this title to be very familiar to the previous titles. The developers did a decent job on the storyline, tying in many references to the console wars and gaming history. There’s a bit of humor that some might find bordering on cheesy or corny, but for the most part we found it to be light and entertaining.

Fans of the series will find this title enjoyable, while fans of this genre of game will probably find it more towards mediocre. We found it more towards mediocre.

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